I love Fallout 3. It was my first Bethesda game, and my first sandbox RPG. I had no idea what I was even doing for those first few hours of gameplay. I actually put it down, and thought it was dumb at one point. Then, for some reason, I started playing again. I played for twelve hours straight, with no kind of entertainment fatigue whatsoever. I was amazed that I could pick up a freakin' cup! I've never been able to do that in any game before! That was just the tip of the iceberg, as I would soon find out. I was exploring, discovering new locations all the time. Upgrading my gear, fixing a town's water system, watching raiders fight supermutants from a distance, looting long dead corpses, finding the secrets of a vault, murdering a sheriff, traversing a minefield. Woah, wait a second, you do that stuff in games already, why is Fallout 3 so special? Because I wasn't guided to that vault, or told to murder that sheriff, I did those things because I chose to do them, and it made the actual act of doing them all the more exciting. Fallout 3 was the first game I ever played that really svcked me in, and didn't let go. I still consider it my favorite game of all time.

Then I played Oblivion, and I was like yeah! It's kind of like Fallout 3! Except it looks a bit crappier, but that's alright! I played and played this game as well, but something didn't feel quite right. I just wasn't as engrossed as I wanted to be. The game just lacked a certain magic for some reason. I put at least as much time into Oblivion as I did in Fallout 3, but it just didn't feel the same. I just said to myself that I liked Fallout 3 better, and left it at that.

Then Skyrim is announced, and I'm so happy, and yadda yadda. When the time came, and I was actually sitting down and playing it, I was having fun, I was enjoying the game a great deal, but that same feeling that there was something missing came over me. I then knew that it wasn't the game's fault, but mine. I simply was a bit burned out on the whole formula of these types of games. I no longer gave a buck about being able to pick up a cup, it was just part of the game to me. Nothing significant.

Maybe I just subconsciously prefer Fallout over the elder scrolls, maybe Oblivion and Skyrim really are inferior to Fallout 3. Maybe I play too many video games. Whatever the reason, my point is this - I think a lot of the disappointment, anger, and sadness people express when talking about things like X game versus Y game, comes not from the actual games, but from the players. People prefer Morrowind because it was their first ES game, or people prefer Oblivion because it was their first ES game. Both games have obvious merits, and neither is actually worse, or better then the other. People just like one or the other, because one contains that certain magic, and the other does not.